For this weeks lecture we had a visit from freelance post production sound engineer Lucy Johnstone who has worked on various huge TV shows and films such as Eastenders as a dubbing mixer and sound editor. This lecture was heavily focused around the steps Lucy takes as a freelance editors, including how she gets work and the relationship between her and the other staff members within certain pieces of work.

 

This lecture was incredibly valuable to me personally as it went into detail about the process of becoming a freelance audio engineer but also included great technical input when it comes to post production. This included how to deal with recording ADR which proved to be incredible relevant as this was something I would be doing only a few days later. The tips included the importance of having a load of pre planning when it comes to waiting including thourough testing on various factors such as talkback levels, headset levels and pre amp settings. She also put across the importance of removing breaths and lip smacks in these ADR tracks, these are factors we plan on implementing when it comes to editing our final piece.

 

This lecture was very vital as it offered advise to going into freelance work in the future. Its was important as it offered useful technical advise when it came to editing including dealing with effects and how to manage them within the mix.

The final day of recording was exclusive to our final location, the abandoned building. As this recording was a bit later on in the week we would finally have access to the clip microphones. One of the issues we faced early on was the fact that one of the radio microphones had no clip attached to it, the way in which I fixed this was attaching two hair clips either side which managed to attach to the actors shirt quite well. On reflection though, we should always check the kit given to us before we head out to location.

 

We also had a fair amount of trouble the 633 recording device as we struggled to get all three channels recording for certain scenes, this would prove to be an issue we’d need to troubleshoot when it came to track dialogue. We notified the director early and managed to secure ADR sessions with the two actors for the following week, ensuring that any dialogue tracks that suffered from technical difficulties could easily be reconciled.

 

Another factor we had to face was the extreme weather; although we were inside a building the wind itself would also ripple through the building and created a warp sound through the boom microphone. This meant we had to take into heavy consideration the locations in which we would film from. This included shooting from between pillars and staying clear of the open window spaces.

 

We would also constantly review our recordings after to ensure that we got the correct results. Although this day had a lot of technically and external difficulties, we managed to come away with useable recordings that’ll factor into the final mix.

Day 3 was a much shorter day, as we were only required to get scenes with one of the actors. We first started the day at Hartsholme Park where we would be recording the introduction scene to the film, as this scene was heavily musically based it wouldn’t so important to track the scenes however we thought we would do just in case the sound would be required in the final mix.

 

After this we would head to the second location, which would be within a local student house, we would be using the living room and the hallways as places to record. This factored into our placement of the boom microphones as we wanted to ensure clean direct recordings that didn’t have too much room sound as this is something we would want to add in post production as we’d then be able to monitor it more efficiently.

 

This day was quite a short one and we didn’t have access to clip microphones again. This wasn’t a massive pitfall though as we didn’t record much dialogue at all. 

 (capturing scene in a hallway.)

Unlike the first day of shooting, this day would be entirely based on key dialogue based scenes. One of the initial problems we encountered before the shoot was the fact that the clip radio microphones were all booked out well in advanced meaning that we would need to improvise for this day. Given the fact however that the characters doing the said dialogue were constantly moving we came to the conclusion that shooting a direct shotgun microphone like the Sennheiser wouldn’t be a bad thing at all. In the end we ended up using two of these microphones with the idea that Ed and me would both track one of the actors each whilst making sure we didn’t cross signal pathways (as that would created muffled recordings).

 

This seemed to work well with the recordings as we had two clear dialogue recordings that we could easily separate without little spill over, meaning we could deal with each characters dialogue track separately.

 

We would also again take into consideration some of the advice given by the guest lecturers including factoring in how to deal with the relationship between the director and us as the sound recordists. For example, ensuring that we never overstepped our boundary by telling everyone to stop doing what they were doing so we could record atmosphere or various foliage, we would do this before and after recording shots.

After multiple months of research and lectures, it had finally came time to be on set recording. Me and Ed Richardson decided it would be beneficial to meet up a day before hand so that we could test the equipment with the set up that we’d be running, that being 2 wireless radio microphones and a Sennheiser boom microphone however after speaking with our director we discovered we’d not be getting a dialouge on that given day. We still used the time to get aquatinted with the 633 field recording device however.

 

For our first day of recording we would be heading to a local forest in Lincoln where we would be tracks scenes that mainly aimed to tie everything together, for this reason we would only be making use of the Sennheiser MKE3000 due to its direct nature when used as a boom microphone. This was was quite a simple shoot, with us mainly tracking footsteps and the general atmosphere, we did however take the advice of Jez Riley French and shoot as much as we possibly could within the time frame. This included recording atmosphere of each location between camera set up. This will prove to be quite useful when it comes to the final edit as we’ll be able to bed multiple slates over a consistent layer of atmosphere.

 

We ended up capturing clear and direct audio. As we went out earlier in the week to do a location check we were able to distinguish some of the issue with recording here and how to deal with them. This included hearing out for planes before shots and checking pathways before hitting record to ensure no shots were disrupted audio wise.